October 26, 2009

The History 12 Stock Market Game was a wonderful mixture of education and fun for our class. It was a simulation of the 1929 stock market crash in the US. Our teacher, Mr. Olson Jr. gave each person a loan from the Bank of Olson of $50, 000 and invested each of us equally into 5 commodities that we traded throughout the block. He then explained the rules to us; he read out real news headlines from that time involving iron, wheat, oil, fish and coal before each round, we were to take that information and use it wisely in our trading. At the end of the trading Mr. Olson called in his loan plus 10% interest for a total of $55,000. There were nine rounds of trading simulating the nine years of the decade that led up to the crash. The game came at the beginning of a new unit for us in which we were learning about USA in the 20’s and 30’s when the huge stock market crash and “Black Tuesday” took place. Personally, before this, I knew absolutely nothing about how the stock market worked but now I can see how easily people can make, and loose, large sums of money on the market. It was a terrible and sad thing what happened to all those people in the States, and the rest of the world at that time. I’m extremely grateful that the crash we experienced not long ago was far less severe.

– Sarah P., grade 12, Kaye's